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an appliance story

1. 1998: 13-inch magnavox television set
from my friend melissa
“it’s actually tim’s,” she said as i pulled the television down from the shelf in her closet.

“where’s the remote?” i asked as i wiped the dust off it.

“umm. i don’t know. tim! where’s the remote for that little tv? i’m giving it to alison.”

“i think i lost it,” he called from the living room, where he was watching a bigger tv. fear factor was on.

“it’s okay,” i said. “i’ll just get a universal remote.” three universal remotes later, i found one that worked.
status: still in use

2. 1998: off-brand vcr
from my boyfriend jeff’s friend kevin
“kevin has so much shit,” jeff said when he brought the vcr over to my new apartment. “he just uses all these old vcrs to stack other shit on.”
status: garbage

3. 1998: small stick vacuum cleaner
from my parents’ friends
it never picked up anything, ever. it was the vacuum cleaner that didn’t suck and sucked, all at the same time. eventually i gave it to ryan, who tried to use it once and promptly threw it away.
status: garbage

4. 1998: microwave
from my boyfriend jeff’s friend kevin
from kevin’s stack o’ appliances. it was so old there were two dials on the front, one that let you cook on HIGH or DEFROST, another that timed the cooking from 1 to 15 minutes. water boiled in eight minutes, soup heated in seven. the back of the microwave said “manufactured in 1985.” number one on a potential list of reasons why i am probably sterile.
status: garbage

5. 1998: computer
from my parents
the computer my parents bought in the early nineties, handed down to me when they bought a new one for themselves. it featured a one-gigabyte hard drive and not much else. the modem worked for awhile, and then it stopped. then everything stopped.
status: part garbage, part still in use

6. 1999: computer
from my boss, teri, at the web-design company
ryan and i took the one-gigabyte hard drive out of my old computer and added it to the new old computer teri gave me. teri’s new old computer was, if possible, worse than my old one. she didn’t clean out the hard drive before she gave it to me, so i had to fight to keep myself from looking through her stuff. i tried to use the extra parts from my old computer to make a giant sculpture on a piece of plywood with some spray paint, but it wasn’t very good. the computer sculpture lived in my parents’ garage until my dad threw it out because he was “tired of looking at it.”

teri’s computer broke, too, and it was a long time before i bought a new one. when i did, yan-david put my original one-gigabyte hard drive into the new computer right next to its twenty-gig one. i still have them both: the twenty-gig is called SIMON and the one-gig is GARFUNKEL.
status: garbage

7. 1999: off-brand vcr #2
from my boyfriend jeff’s friend kevin
the first kevin vcr broke, so kevin gave me another one from the stack. this one broke, too, but not for another year. when it did break, there was a tape in it, and i spent an afternoon trying to pry the tape out with a screwdriver to no avail. i don’t remember what was on the tape.
status: garbage

8. 1999: old sears oscillating fan
from my parents
i used it to push the air from the living room, where there was a window unit, into the bedroom, where there was no window unit. one day i was in the living room watching tv, and i happened to look over at the window unit in time to see a gigantic cockroach fall out of it and onto the floor. anyway, the fan was so dusty i couldn’t get it clean, even after taking it apart.
status: still in use

9. 1999: old telephone
from my parents
the power went out in my apartment one day and my cordless phone/answering machine didn’t work (duh), so i couldn’t call and tell anyone that the power was out. i asked my parents if they had an extra phone i could use in these situations. they did.
status: still in use, usually when they cut off my electricity because i forget to pay the bill and i have to call and pay the bill to get them to turn it back on

(in 2000 i made good money and could afford stuff; in 2001 i was in school and couldn’t afford any stuff and didn’t know anyone who had any extra stuff, except for…)

10. 2001: intel webcam
from shaun
shaun had an extra webcam, i had an extra mouse. i needed a webcam, he needed a mouse. we traded.
status: still in use

11. 2002: sears solid state television
from shaun
really, really old television, with fake wood paneling and dials on the front, made before remote controls were even invented. shaun found it abandoned in the hallway of a dormitory when he was moving out one semester. he used it for awhile and then gave it to me when his parents gave him their old one. i plugged it into the vcr and the vcr into the stereo, and used the vcr remote to change the channels and the stereo remote to adjust the volume. the melissa magnavox got moved into the bedroom.
status: still in use

12. 2002: coffeemaker / espresso machine
from steve, a fellow waiter
as i bought this from steve’s garage sale, it technically shouldn’t be on this list, but it’s so old that the name of the manufacturer is rubbed off, so it sort of counts. it was about to rain when i arrived at the garage sale, and steve and his wife were already packing things up. “how much is that?” i asked steve when i saw the coffeemaker. andy had been using an old metal camping thingy on my stove to make his coffee in the morning, so i figured i needed one.

“i don’t know,” steve said. “how much do you want to pay?”

“i don’t know, either,” i said. “ten dollars?”

“sold,” he said. i’d probably have offered five dollars if i hadn’t known he needed the money. the coffeemaker part works fine, but i’ve never tried to use the espresso part. it’s broken for all i know.
status: still in use

13. 2003: smart and friendly external cd burner
from my dad
when my parents bought a new computer, my dad gave the old dvd drive to my sister and the old cd burner to me. the cd burner is so old that they don’t make it anymore, and the software doesn’t work in windows xp. with a name like “smart and friendly,” i’m not surprised. i had to try four or five cd burning programs before i found one that would even recognize the smart and friendly on my computer.
status: still in use

14. 2003: apex dvd player
from yossef
who read something i wrote about not having a dvd player, and offered me his old one. he brought it to me at a scattered pages show, prompting everyone to ask, “what the hell is that?” it’s a dvd player, stupid. despite a few minor glitches, and some horrible and inexplicable chunk-chunk sounds it makes when it loads, it works just fine.
status: still in use

15. 2003: lucent cordless phone
from my parents
the cordless phone/answering machine i got for christmas in 1998 stopped letting me push its buttons. in other words, if there was an incoming call and the phone was in the cradle, i could pick it up and it would answer the call automatically. if it wasn’t in the cradle, though, i could push the TALK button for hours and never be able to answer the call. additionally, i couldn’t dial out because again with the talk button, and also none of the numbers on the keypad worked, either.

it still worked as an answering machine, though, and i had 20 permanently-saved messages on it i didn’t want to lose (the first time ryan called, the first time andy called, funny messages from rob and my sister, the british guy i dated offering to cook me dinner…). so i got my parents’ old cordless phone and plugged it into the other phone jack. now i use their cordless phone for outgoing calls and the broken one for incoming calls and messages.
status: still in use

16. 2003: panasonic microwave
from my parents
when my parents remodeled the kitchen, they bought a new microwave and gave me their old one. it’s digital and has a turntable on the inside and a button that calculates how long to cook microwave popcorn. it boils water in three minutes. in a way it made me sad to throw away the 1985 kevin microwave, the last and hardiest of the kevin appliances. in another way, it’ll be nice to be able to bear children.
status: still in use